1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, systems, and products for publicly accessible deferred purchasing systems.
2. Description of Related Art
In the current art of on-line purchasing, there is no useful way to enter a delayed purchase request for a purchase order to be issued to a vendor at a later time. In current art, on-line purchasers enter current purchase orders directed to known vendors. Often, however, purchasers have gift or supply purchasing obligations, or other purchasing obligations, occurring at predictable times in the future, for which it would be convenient to plan now, for example, as an aid to memory or as part of a budgeted business plan. Or in some cases, regardless of memory or plans, a purchaser has time to work on-line now but knows that she will not have much time later when a purchase is needed.
That is, the subject of the present disclosure is delayed purchasing. More specifically, our subject is knowing today that a purchaser wishes to effect a purchase at some time in the future and making available to the purchaser a publicly-accessible system for entering deferred purchase requests having issue dates that result in the issuance of purchase orders on the issue dates. The advantage of such a public delayed purchasing system is that delayed purchase orders can be created as planning mechanisms days, week, or months in advance of the actual issuance date, for convenience, for planning, as aids to memory, for birthdays, anniversaries, holiday gifts and greetings, and so on. The benefits are for personal use and for business use, as in the case of advance entries of deferred purchase requests for estimated quantities of office supplies, so that even tiny businesses can have the benefits of ‘just-in-time’ controls of needed supplies, with no need to invest heavily in the infrastructure to effect such controls.
A publicly available delayed purchasing system would be even more beneficial if it were accessible by a variety of network-oriented interfaces, including, for example, personal computers communicating via the Internet, ordinary telephones, hand-held wireless internet-enabled special purpose devices, internet-enabled personal digital assistants, mobile phones, internet-enabled cell phones, and so on. Such publicly accessible delayed purchasing systems do not exist, although it would be advantageous if they did.